Relax, iOS Isn’t Going to Replace OS X

A prediction has been going around the blogosphere for a few months saying that Apple will eventually replace OS X with iOS, and a lot of people seem to agree. I don’t. That prediction has never sounded to me like something Apple would do, but it’s more than instinct: Steve Jobs has said himself that it’s false.

Back in June, Dan Lyons wrote an article for Newsweek that claimed that OS X was dead and that Apple was ignoring it in favor of iOS. Later, Dennis Sellers of Macsimum News emailed Steve Jobs himself about the article, and his response, in his characteristically concise form, was: “Completely wrong. Just wait.”

Another email sent to Jobs a month before WWDC 2010 from Matthias Gansrigler asked him about the lack of Apple design awards for Mac applications at the event. Jobs response was: “We are focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on iPhone OS this year. Maybe next year we will focus primarily on the Mac. Just the normal cycle of things. No hidden meaning here.”

Of course, you can argue that those emails were faked. I’m sure people have faked emails from Jobs before. However, the cycle described in the second email certainly fits with how Apple does things, as related by Sachin Agarwal, who used to work for Apple on Final Cut Pro. He states that Apple has engineers who work in small teams, and may not be working on the same thing all the time:

Apple doesn’t build large teams to work on every product they make. Instead, they hire very few, but very intelligent people who can work on different projects and move around as needed. One day you might be working on the Remote app, and the next day you might get pulled on to another project that needs your help. The engineers on the Mac OS and iOS teams move back and forth between the two projects based on release cycles and what needs to ship next.

If that weren’t enough to convince you, Apple posted a job listing for someone to develop a “new and revolutionary” feature for OS X. Doesn’t sound like something Apple would do for a dead OS, does it? (Though I’m sure someone will argue that this new feature is iOS on a Mac, which I doubt, based on the emails mentioned above.)

From this evidence it looks like people are making a big deal out of nothing. But what do you think? Would you want to see iOS on a Mac?